How Sales Enablement Insights Can Support Business Initiatives

By Peter Mollins

A sales enablement tool such as SAVO helps businesses prioritize and direct their sales enablement investments. Hundreds of global enterprises rely on answers from our analytics platform to best support their sales organization and address critical business initiatives.

How Do You Support Business Initiatives?

B2B organizations want to expand to new markets, launch new products, and maximize revenue. Regardless of what your primary business initiative is, you want to achieve it. A vital component of that success is to ensure that your sellers are enabled and aligned with the change:

If sellers are not aligned with organizational change, for instance with poorly onboarded new hires, revenue will be dragged down.

If channel partners can’t position and sell new products, you will lose traction.

If new sales processes are unused by sellers, they won’t have the impact needed.

These challenges come back to a root issue: how do you enable your sales organization to achieve your business priorities?

Sales Enablement Analytics Address Business Questions

Industry analysts are clear: businesses with effective sales enablement programs generate 14% more sales than their peers. And optimized sales enablement programs depend on analytics to intelligently make these strategic investments.

That’s why the world’s largest and fastest growing sales teams use SAVO’s dashboards to guide their business initiatives, improve sales enablement, and boost revenue.

Reporting Templates Built on Industry Best Practices

Sales enablement analytics are more than reports — they’re business tools. They help you make business decisions specific to your organization — decisions that directly impact your revenue. But this only works if the analytics are tuned to your unique business needs.

The SAVO platform supports the achievement of business initiatives by gathering rich insights into how well your sales and go-to-market teams are aligned with corporate priorities. It collects rich data into the effectiveness of your sales enablement resources and tools. Understanding how well you are shaping and improving sales behavior is critical to achieving your business priorities.

SAVO has developed reporting templates that can be configured and adjusted with ease to address your unique business priorities. These templates are designed to support your top business initiatives because they’re built on best practices generated across over one million global users.

Let’s look at several examples of how SAVO’s best practice reporting templates can address key sales enablement use cases.

Do my sellers have time to focus on core selling?

Core selling time is a precious commodity. But just 29% of the average seller’s day is focused on creating, advancing, and closing opportunities. One of the primary drains on seller productivity is time lost looking for and creating content or insights to share with prospects. In fact, analysts estimate that up to 40 hours a month per sales person are spent on content activities.

Putting more time back into core selling requires understanding where the 40 hours of content effort are lost. Our customers use analytics and reports to investigate this drain. Their goal: identify wasted or duplicated effort. We’re seeing customers put nearly 10% of a seller’s day back into core selling — a massive improvement.

Imagine you’ve just held a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) with your sales team. At that meeting, your team rolled out brand new positioning and content. These new resources will help your sellers to be more effective — but only if they use them. Too often sellers revert to what they knew. That can slash both efficiency and seller effectiveness.

A Seller Resource Center reporting template can address this need. Leaders can track access to and use of the new content to uncover adoption challenges. In this template, we filter access to just the period following the QBR. The template then lets us group usage based on profile of the sellers. That lets us identify which teams are adopting and using the new resources — and which need to be coached or better supported.

Can my sellers respond dynamically to changing sales situations?

Sales situations can change in a second. A competitor may suddenly insert itself into your deal. A customer may ask a challenging technical question. Or a new decision-maker may have specific ROI-related issues that your seller must confront. How your seller responds to these hurdles can make or break your quarter.

How do you help a seller here? You need to provide them with internal guidance and relevant coaching to help them respond to buyer challenges. SAVO customers want to know how well they’re supporting their sellers to address these challenges. Ensuring that sellers are ready to handle these diverse situations is key to enabling your team.

To equip sellers to handle these stressful situations requires understanding whether they have access to and are using resources specific to their sales context. Sales enablement content isn’t just marketing content —it’s also internally-facing coaching and guidance materials that help sellers understand and position their offer.

Using the Situational Guidance reporting template, SAVO customers can visualize whether these internally-facing resources are being used by sellers. Understanding which teams aren’t relying on coaching and guidance can help managers redirect teams — and encourage the creation of more targeted materials.

Can my sellers provide a compelling buyer’s journey?

More than half of a buyer’s decision comes down to their experience in the sales process. If a buyer feels that one vendor has answered questions, provided a business case, and supported internal discussions more effectively, she is more likely to choose that vendor. So, it’s vital that you enable sellers to support the buyer throughout their process.

A best practice approach to support buyers is to equip sellers with compelling content that speaks to a buyer’s specific needs. That requires that a seller can efficiently tailor presentations, proposals, and other assets to best engage their prospect. Sales enablement teams need to understand which assets are being tailored, and how they can improve them to better support the buyer’s journey.

SAVO’s Buyer Experience reporting template offers a path. Leaders can understand which content has been customized by their sellers by filtering on whether content was for a “custom” or “standard” engagement. Sales enablers can then see which assets are most commonly adapted by sellers and how they were adjusted.

Armed with this insight, sales enablement teams can produce more of the right material that sellers need as the foundation for their custom sales engagements. That means more support for buyer needs and more traction throughout the buyer journey.

How do I support sellers best and keep on-message and on-brand?

95% of sellers want more marketing content to use in their sales process. Why? Because they know how vital content is to engage and advance prospects. But is marketing content used by sellers? The answer is largely ‘no’ — in fact, just 25% of marketing content is used by the sales team. Sellers are either not using assets or are spending time creating their own, which may be off message, off-brand, or inconsistent.

To ensure that marketing is building the right materials and supporting sellers requires insights. Our customers’ marketing teams use analytics to calculate the ROI of their content, understand gaps in their portfolio, and identify what to build next. The aim here is to ensure that sellers stay on message with consistent, proven content that advances deals.

SAVO’s Message Consistency reporting template can address that information gap. Let’s say your marketing team is about to launch a new product upgrade. They want to ensure that the content, guidance, and other resources associated with the launch will support the sales team and where they need to improve content.

The reporting template can filter based on content related to the launch. Marketing can see how fresh related content is. Stale, unused content may need updating, while frequently used content may need to be urgently updated to stay current and keep sales humming.

The template can also help answer other key questions in support of message consistency, such as which content is currently stalled in review by content approvers. Approvals are among the biggest, and most unnecessary, drags on delivering content. The report can filter assets by which are in review, letting marketing spot friction points and get more content authorized.

How do I onboard new sellers and reinforce best practices?

To add value to their buyers, sales people need to be current on the market, their products, and business value. And sales guidance and processes can help them shepherd deals to close. But are sellers adopting these best practices that drive success?

Our customers recognize that reinforcing best practices is critical to seller success. They look at strategies that serve up relevant information and coaching when needed. But without insight into their adoption, sales enablement teams can’t produce needed resources.

SAVO’s Training and Reinforcement reporting template can look at asset consumption by type of asset. A sales leader can filter by Sales Playbook, for instance, to see whether a certain sales play is being referenced by the team. An ignored play may not be getting recommended to sellers, for example. In this case, sales enablement teams can improve the training resources and their curation to ensure greater use by sellers.

Similarly, the dashboard can be filtered on seller role in the organization. It’s vital that newly onboarded team members are accessing resources and getting up to speed. The reporting template can be filtered to focus just on newly hired sellers. Administrators can quickly see which team members are getting the resources they need to quickly become high-performance sellers.

Make Decisions that Support Your Business Initiatives

Hundreds of global businesses rely on SAVO to enable their sellers. With our templated and customizable reporting capabilities, they also gain insight into the performance of their sales enablement resources. The result is that they can quickly answer questions and identify opportunities for improvement to drive more sales and align with business initiatives.